Haiti's economic development has been held back by a history of civil conflict and violence. With donor assistance declining from its exceptional levels following the 2010 earthquake, and concessional financing growing scarce, Haiti must learn to live with tighter budget constraints. At the same...

This paper explores the conditions under which public spending could minimize violent conflict related to oil wealth. Previous work suggests that oil can lead to violent conflict because it increases the value of the state as a prize or because it undermines the state's bureaucratic penetration....

Many low-income countries, such as Haiti, have high ambitions and socioeconomic needs to achieve substantial income growth, especially for the poorest income quintiles. This situation raises the question of policy prioritization, which is often difficult to address, since reliable...

Studies on the link between financial development and poverty have been inconclusive. Some claim that deeper financial sectors should improve the allocation of capital by allowing entrepreneurs greater access to finance, which should particularly favor the poor. Others argue that improvements in...

This paper aims at assessing the impact of migration on export performance and more particularly the effect of African migrants on African trade. Relying on a new data set on international bilateral migration recently released by the World Bank spanning from 1980 to 2010, the authors estimate a...

Although trade liberalization is being actively promoted as a key component in development strategies, theoretically, the impact of trade openness on poverty reduction is ambiguous. A more liberalized trade regime is argued to change relative factor prices in favor of the more abundant factor....

Although there has been research looking at the relationship between the structure of the financial system and economic growth, much less work has dealt with the importance of bank-based versus market-based financial systems for poverty and income distribution. Empirical evidence has indicated...

This paper argues that state weakness is broader than implied previously in the civil war literature, and that particular types of weakness in interaction with natural resources have aggravating or mitigating consequences for the risk of civil war. While in anocracies or unstable regimes natural...

The most influential recent work on the determinants of civil warsfound the factors associated with the grievance motivation to be largely irrelevant. Our paper subjects the results of this empirical work to further scrutiny by embedding the study of civil war in a more general analysis of...